4 results
7 - Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound in Washington and Rapallo
-
- By Massimo Bacigalupo, teaches American literature at the University of Genoa.
- Edited by Thomas Austenfeld
-
- Book:
- Robert Lowell in a New Century
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2019, pp 95-104
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro che corrono a Verona il drappo verde per la campagna; e parve di costoro quelli che vince, non colui che perde.
—Dante, InfernoROBERT LOWELL WAS poetry consultant at the Library of Congress in 1947–48 and saw much of Ezra Pound in this period. He had already approached Pound at age nineteen, in May 1936, asking permission to become his student in Rapallo, and those early letters are full of a young beginner's enthusiasm but also insights. Lowell already points out that Pound's dictum of “the fewest possible words” should be replaced by “reality (boredom, religion, anything) expressed with the utmost vitality,” and that Pound's diction is at least as strange as Milton's. Lowell was to continue to defend Milton and to exalt Virgil, the poet of Augustus, against Pound's strictures (Letters, 223, 227, 231): “Sometimes I think you were born in Sioux City instead of Venezia.” On a later occasion he tells Pound he wishes that the poet had reread his own Pisan Cantos and pruned them! But of course their bulk is part of their success. The relationship with Pound reveals that Lowell was insatiable for experience, and persistent in going after his masters and keeping up a running argument with them and his peers. In the present paper I will consider some littleknown interactions, or intersections, between the two poets, especially in relation to Lowell's elegy for his mother, “Sailing Home from Rapallo,” and to their concern with Dante.
Lowell has a way of treating his masters as equals, with enviable assurance. His casual comments on The Cantos are a useful guide to that forbidding poem. For example, reading the journalist Lincoln Steffens on the Russian Revolution, Lowell tells Pound, with perhaps a touch of adulation:
I was astonished at the wonderful job you have done on his beginning of the Russian Revolution. Your section has been in my mind for twenty years, yet the original is only a piece of buoyant journalism. A few phrases cleaned up, a touch of setting, the right rhythm. You beat anyone at opening windows and letting air into your poem. (September 17, 1956, Letters, 260)
As Saskia Hamilton tells us in her notes to Lowell's Letters, this is a reference to a passage in Canto 16, the closing pages of Pound's first complete book of Cantos (I–XVI, 1925).
18 - Dante
-
- By Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
-
- Book:
- T. S. Eliot in Context
- Published online:
- 05 August 2012
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2011, pp 180-189
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Speaking of Dante in 1950 to the Italian Institute in London, T. S. Eliot said: ‘I still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse’ (TCC, 125). Poets' statements about their own work are not always to be trusted, but it is true that Eliot found in Dante a continuous source of inspiration, as probably only a non-Italian poet could. Inevitably, his reading developed over the decades, with his style and outlook, and within the context of contemporary culture and society. But certain passages remained ‘touchstones’ (as Matthew Arnold called them), to which he returned again and again.
The poet Arnaut Daniel, caught in the purgatorial fire and speaking in his arcane and melodious tongue, remained an Eliot persona, perhaps the Eliot persona. In Purgatorioxxvi another poet, Guido Guinizelli, tells Dante that ‘questi ch'io ti cerno col dito … fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ [‘he whom I point out … was a better craftsman of the mother tongue’] and Eliot appropriated the sobriquet ‘miglior fabbro’ in the generous dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound. He used the final line of this canto, narrated by Dante, ‘then he hid in the fire that refines them’, among the fragments ‘shored’ at the end of his masterpiece, in the original Italian.
23 - Rapallo and Rome
- Edited by Ira B. Nadel, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
-
- Book:
- Ezra Pound in Context
- Published online:
- 05 July 2014
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2010, pp 250-260
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
RAPALLO AND THE OCCASIONS OF THE CANTOS
Pound lived mostly in and near Rapallo, just south of Genoa, from 1924 to his death, and this place and its landscape permeated his mature poetry. In Cantos xvii–xxx we find many Mediterranean settings in which Odysseus and his avatars rest from their voyages, and the theme is repeated in the “fertility Cantos” of the 1930s, especially xxxix, xlvii, and xlix, where Pound creates his own rituals out of old Rapallo customs (the “sepulchres,” i.e., floral church decorations, of Maundy Thursday, the lights floated in the bay on summer nights). Pound wanted to evoke a true religion of the people, beyond (or before) Judaism and Christianity, and used the material at hand, for example, Christian ceremonies, that looked as if they may well have derived from pagan customs.
In the 1920s Rapallo provided the model for an aesthetic pleasance, in the 1930s the backdrop for a more strenuous “totalitarian” vision, a religion of sexuality, abundance, and fertility. In the 1940s it became the lost paradise of The Pisan Cantos, that shuttle throughout between the beautiful Pisan landscape and memories of the Tigullio (as the Bay of Rapallo is called), where Pound had passed the greater part of his maturity.
9 - Pound as critic
- Edited by Ira B. Nadel, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 11 February 1999, pp 188-203
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Ezra Pound published some seven books that can fall under the heading Literary Criticism. The majority of these were collections of previously printed essays: Favannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations (1920), Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937). None of these has remained in print, having been replaced by T. S. Eliot's excellent selection Literary Essays (1954), and by William Cookson's omnium gatherum, Selected Prose (1973). These anthologies contain some of Pound's better known and more important critical writings. But they are necessarily uneven, for they have not been conceived as a single effort by their author.
A more unified picture of Pound the critic emerges from the books and pamphlets that he envisaged and brought forth as a whole. These are The Spirit of Romance (1910), How To Read (1931), ABC of Reading (1934), Guide to Kulchur (1938), Carta da Visita (1942). The two last are devoted only in part to literature, but this is characteristic of the uncompartmentalized way Pound worked. In fact, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) could be added to the list of books of criticism that were created as wholes. These unified volumes make for exciting reading because they move with their own momentum, in a somewhat improvisational fashion, from day to day, and often refer to their writing in process by place and date.